Journal

We have now completed our testing of the initial White Mage town – Galice. This means that it is fully functional and has been played through as part of our game testing. This includes all of the shops, NPCs, interactive events, and everything else needed to prepare for the first dungeon – the Coastal Cave. The only thing not included in Galice at the moment is the large port which will require some additional art before it can be mapped. ...

While testing the White Mage prologue, we realized that two-handed weapons were not fully implemented. To give some background, Last Dream II has two primary types of weapons for each character class:

1) Single-handed weapons which allows the offhand to be equipped with a defensive item

2) Two-handed weapons that take up both the primary hand and off-hand

During testing, we realized that two-handed weapons and offhand equipment (such as shields) could be equipped at the same time. We’ve now fixed this to ...

In our last post about the White Mage skill tree completion and the removal of Minor mage skill upgrades, we discussed balancing the Mage skill tree total SP cost with the Physical skill tree total SP cost. We found that even the removal of the Minor upgrades still left the total SP cost of the Mage skill tree approximately twice as high as that of the Physical skill trees. The simplest way to interpret this is that the physical classes ...

Completing the White Mage skill tree has been more challenging that the other classes we’ve worked on to this point because of the different structure of the skill upgrades. In an earlier post, we discussed how Mage skills would have both Major and Minor upgrades. After some careful consideration, we’ve decided that the Minor upgrades are overkill and that in order to balance the Physical class skill SP cost with that of the Mages, we needed to drop the Minor ...

It’s been a while since we posted about the class upgrades in Last Dream II. Midway through the Last Dream II, each class will have a major decision to make regarding which character class upgrade to path to choose. As opposed to Last Dream I where the class upgrade unlocked new skills but offered no choice, the Last Dream II class upgrade will be a major decision on how to shape each character, especially with regards to the skills available.

The ...

We’re working our way through the skill and state animations for the White Mage skills. We decided to start on the Null element skills:

• Null Fire
• Null Ice
• Null Lightning
• Null Wind
• Null Gamble
• Null All

Null Gamble is a new skill in the Last Dream series that is meant for desperate circumstances that gives a small chance of absorbing (e.g. healing) from certain element damage, but it’s random in terms of which element and whether it works or not. All the others should be self-explanatory and ...

The second dungeon of the White Mage prologue – Felton Swamp – has now been completed! Now that the Felton Swamp is complete, we’ll be returning to the Village of Felton which is largely complete except for mapping the interiors of a few buildings and adding the residents of the town. We hope to complete the Village of Felton this weekend and then all that will remain for the White Mage prologue is completing the final skill animations, mapping the ...

We’ve now completed the mapping and mechanics of the White Mage’s prologue first dungeon – the Coastal Cave! This is one of our more ambitious dungeons thus far and features tidal mechanics where you must avoid the high tide to avoid getting  washed back to the beginning of the cave. We also populated the area with numerous small animals such as crabs, fish, and seagulls. We’re slowly figuring out the most efficient way to create maps like this which will ...

We are continuing our effort to convert our draft menus into finalized designs. Our recent focus has been the Victory Aftermath menu which plays whenever the party is victorious in battle. It shows information such as EXP gained, SP gained, overdrive gained, and any enemy drops/gold.

The old design was purely functional and lacked style. It was also a bit cramped because it attempted to fit everything on a single screen which can be preferable when possible; however, in this case, ...

As our development team continues to play other classic RPGs for inspiration, we realized that a key missing element in the Last Dream II battle system was showing the probability of inflicting status effects. It can be frustrating not knowing what the probability to inflict a particular status effect is and whether you are wasting your time trying to paralyze, blind, or confuse a powerful enemy.

We have recently added a new heads-up display element to battle that will show the ...